Online broker ShareBuilder, which is part of ING Direct, used to run a lot of promotions in the early days when there weren’t as many real discount brokers as there are now. Back then, buying stocks with only $4 commission (with their automatic investment plan) seemed to be a good deal for many cost-conscious small investors. Trading real-time with ShareBuilder costs even more, at $9.95 per trade to be exact.
Now, with so many discount brokers to choose from, some even offer stock trades that cost less than $4 per trades (for example, OptionsHouse $2.95/trade and SogoTrade $3/trade) without the constrain that you can only invest on a particular day of the month, I don’t know how many people are still interested in trading with ShareBuilder. I know I am not. I opened a few accounts a long time ago to take advantage of the free bonus offer. Now they have all been shut down. Of course, with ShareBuilder, you can buy partial shares since the dollar amount for each trade is fixed. You can’t do this with other brokers because you can only buy a number of shares in each trade. This could work better if the stock you want to buy has a very high share price that prevents you from buying a whole share. With ShareBuilder, though, you can buy a fraction of one share at a time and accumulate shares gradually.
But if you are one of those who still want to have an account with ShareBuilder, then here’s a $50 bonus offer for you. From now to December 31, 2009, if you open an account with ShareBuilder using promo code TRADEBONUS and make one trade before the deadline, you will receive the $50 bonus in about four weeks after the account opening.
